Who's Picturing DC?

Welcome back from what was hopefully a relaxing weekend of eating, sleeping and...well, I think Jim Gaffigan put it best:

Thanksgiving. It’s like we didn’t even try to come up with a tradition. The tradition is, we overeat. “Hey, how about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?” “We do that every day!” “Oh. What if we eat a lot with people that annoy the hell out of us?”

(Just kidding, mom.)

Before we dive back into the fun and lunacy that is local neighborhood politics stuff, I thought I'd share something lighter and, to me at least, interesting in that wastes-a-lot-of-my-time-at-work kind of way. If you don't know who Eric Fischer is, he's the guy that does all of those colorful maps of cities around the world that show things like demographic data, transit usage and so on. (If you missed his series on race and ethnicity, go immediately and check it out.)

Because I am a nerd at heart, I found myself perusing Eric's Flickr photostream recently and came across a series entitled "The Geotaggers World Atlas," where he took data derived from images on Flickr and Picasa and mapped them to show where it was in each city that people take photos. But then he took it a step further and categorized each image based on whether they were taken by a tourist (red dot) local (blue dot) are undetermined (yellow dot). In addition to showing which cities get photographed the most (DC checks in at #8, ahead of Rome but behind Boston; #s 1-3 are NYC, London and Paris), it provides some insight into what sections of cities tourists go (and take pictures), and where they don't.

I'm struggling to find a great amount of "real life" applicability here, but I'll be damned if these aren't tremendously fascinating.

Fun With Google Streetview

If there's anyone out there who hasn't yet had an opportunity to test drive Google's "StreetView" application, I'd recommend it as a good way to kill some time at work. Heck, if you're like me it will completely suck you in. It's the next best thing to actually walking through a neighborhood...or driving it...or living in it. But whatever.

Just for fun, I grabbed a few screenshots of some areas around Logan/U Street and though I'd share them here. The pic quality is low-res--I guess they have to be in order for the program to function properly. Once I got over the pseudo-creepiness factor of being able to look into my living room window through this program, I decided that it's pretty darn neat. See for yourself...

1500 block of U Street:

1200 block of U St., showing the Lincoln Theater, Ben's Chili Bowl and the True Reformer Building:

13th St. rowhouses, just north of U St.:

1400 block of P St.:

Pretty houses around Logan Circle:

The corner of 11th and P, looking west towards Logan Circle:

11th and U, looking north towards Bohemian Caverns:

Businesses along 14th St.: